Here is one of the most pernicious facts about civil asset forfeiture:

Forfeited vehicles are to be sold; the proceeds are used first to pay any "bona fide or innocent purchaser..." of the vehicle.... After paying the costs of publishing the notice of the forfeiture action and of storing, repairing and selling the vehicle, remaining funds are distributed in proportionate shares to the involved prosecuting and law enforcement agencies.

Volokh Conspiracy blogger Ilya Somin has an important post here about the increasing use of eminent doamin to transfer land to companies like Wal-Mart and Costco to construct stores:

they very likely cause more economic harm than benefit, as I have argued in great detail here and here. In addition, they tend to victimize poor and lower-middle class interests for the benefit of politically powerful developers and corporations such as Costco and its rivals.

So what we have here is another right-to-take case from a state supreme court, and another rejection of the Kelo anything-goes approach. So far, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma and South Carolina have rejected the Kelo approach of taking at face value whatever the condemnor-municipality offers as evidence, even when that "evidence" can only be said to bear a rational relation to the conceivable. In the Show-Me state it will take more than that.

The US Supreme Court's majority now stands effectively isolated from the mainstream of American judicial thought on the right to take.

Debra J. Saunders, an excellent writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, had this article in the Sunday paper focusing on the Revelli Tire Store case from Oakland. Excerpt:

[Oakland City Attorney John Russo] bristles at the notion that Oakland kicked Revelli out of his property. "I believe that the Revelli case, for him, was a case of stubbornness and sentiment," Russo told me, adding that the city paid above appraisal for the property.

Russo is right, Revelli is sentimental. Revelli -- who now calls himself "forcibly retired" -- asked Oakland to put off the seizure. Instead, the city took the land -- then left his property unchanged for many months, during which Revelli could have been in business. His father started Revelli Tires in 1949. Revelli owned the property, with a prime location a block from BART, free and clear. "I created a situation where I could compete with everyone else in the tire business," he explained, "because I worked by myself. I had no employees. Nobody treats the business like the owner treats the business."

Revelli's retirement plan had been to sell his business and lease the property -- if, that is, he felt the urge to retire. Instead he has $615,000 -- minus legal fees and a whopping capital-gains tax bill. Even if $615,000 is above appraisal, the deal shortchanged his future.

Of course, given that the Revelli seizure was done under the watch of Oakland mayor Jerry Brown, who is now the state's Attorney General--do you suppose we'll see any eminent domain reform in this state any time soon?

David A. Dana has a new paper, "Reframing Eminent Domain: Unsupported Advocacy, Ambiguous Economics, and the Case for a New Public Use Test," posted on SSRN.com. I have only scanned it, but I see some interesting observations in his conclusions:

is there some other kind of eminent domain reform that might predictably produce desirable results? The permissive "public use" test that existed in most states before Kelo and that Kelo reaffirmed as the federal constitutional law approach does nothing to select for some development and not others based on any reasonably coherent normative criteria. As the Kelo dissenters emphasized, development for "economic development" can be almost any development that promises more tax revenue than existing land uses, and unless increases in tax revenue alone are a good proxy for a normative standard of goodness," allowing an economic development purpose to satisfy the "public use" requirement does not screen development based on any normatively defensible criteria.... [E]ven if we assume blight condemnations only reach "true" blight and such blight is indeed "bad" and thus it is good to remove it, there is nothing in the approach that allows condemnations to remove blight that does anything to select for good (however measured) development to replace the blight.... If we want eminent domain to select for good development, we should consider eminent domain reform that ties the availability of eminent domain to the characteristics of the development that will replace current land uses.

The problem with this is that the terms "good" and "bad" when referring to land use mean nothing more or less than that use of the land which is of the highest economic value on a free market. There is no standard of measuring utility that makes any sense other than what consumers are willing to subsidize by freely choosing to shop at a store, or to pay for the use of a parking lot, or what have you. Is it "good" to have a Long's Drugs on the corner of Main and Broadway? The only sensible answer to that question is to see whether it is profitable or not. Anything else is simply elevating one person's preferences (usually the preferences of some bureaucrat with big ideas) over the preferences of another person in a way that is not justified by any legitimate argument.

Economic efficiency is simply nothing more or less than the transactions that people freely enter into. As Nobel laureate James Buchanan puts it, "voluntary exchanges among persons, within a competitive constraint structure, generate efficient resource usage, which is determined only as the exchanges are made." Buchanan, "Rights, Efficiency, And Exchange: The Irrelevance of Transaction Cost” (1984) reprinted inJames M. Buchanan, The Logical Foundations of Constitutional Liberty 260, 273-74 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999). To speak of "good" development is therefore only to speak of "development of which consumers and producers freely approve on a market without being constrained by government." To speak of "good" development in any other sense—for example, to speak of "good" development undertaken by government development agencies, is senseless. Government development agencies are systematically incapable of generating "good"—i.e., efficient—economic development precisely because they use money taken from consumers without their consent (taxes) or borrowed from future generations without their consent (bonds) and use eminent domain to force landowners to give up their property (through eminent domain). The only development that comes out of government development agencies is politically successful development, which may or may not reflect the actual wishes of the consumer. But the only scientifically possible, or morally legitimate, standard of judgment for these things is the actual wishes of the consumer. Everything else is inefficient and unjust.

Leonard Gilroy at the Reason Foundation has an excellent blog post about the Arizona Republic's pseudo-story about the apocalyptic terrors of government planners when it comes to Prop. 207 actually working to protect people's rights. Excerpt:

Prop 207 hasn't done anything to restrict cities' ability to plan, create special districts, and the like; rather, it merely holds them accountable for the impacts of these planning decisions on the property rights of affected landowners. Citizens now have a form of relief if cities and counties adopt zoning changes and land use regulations that devalue private property. Nothing in the measure precludes or prevents governments from regulating land use; it simply offers aggrieved landowners a remedy, either via compensation for property devaluation or exemption from the regulation at hand.

Eric de Place at the Sightline Institute has a blog post on various property rights matters that is typically Chicken Little about how respecting the rights of people who own property will lead to social ruin, or, in his words "a disaster flick in slow motion." For example, in the town of Avondale, government officials are having to come to grips with the awful fact that they're going to have to let Wal-Mart open a store on land that Wal-Mart fairly bought and paid for with money that it didn't steal from anybody. Some bureaucrats (and, evidently, Mr. de Place) would prefer to force consumers to pay more for products they need, or to travel farther for those goods, in order that society might look the way government planners would prefer it to look. Silly me, thinking that consumers, and not bureaucrats wielding the coercive power of the state, should decide what businesses prevail in a neighborhood and what don't.

And, just to show how on top of things de Place is, he points out an astonsihing SHOCKA! new report.... Guess what? The "secretive" activist Howie Rich helped fund the Prop. 90 campaign. No! Really? Wow, we didn't hear that a billion times a day last year....

Isn't it sad how those who are opposed to property rights don't even much try to come up with good arguments nowadays, but simply use ad hominem charges (and often untrue ones: "PLF is industry funded!") to avoid addressing the fundamental fact that what they're arguing for is a world in which other people tell you how you can use your property?